Write Your Screenplay Podcast

This week, Jacob Krueger analyzes Episode 5 and discusses how the three levels of structure - plot, emotion, and theme - need to tie together to create a powerful journey for both your characters and your audience.

This week, Jacob Krueger analyzes Episode 4 and focuses on the importance of revision in keeping an audience connected to your characters by creating a structure that comes from a place of truth.

Jacob Krueger discusses The Battle of Winterfell and the poetry and structure behind writing an action sequence built on the interpersonal drama of the characters within it.

This week, Jacob Krueger discusses the events of Episodes 1 and 2 of Season 8 and shares how you can take an audience along on any journey, but first you have to make them care.

Jacob Krueger compares and contrasts two Game of Thrones pilots: Season 8, Episode 1 and Season 1, Episode 1, to show you the elements of a successful pilot, and how, as a writer, you can benefit from “saving the best for first.”

For eight seasons, Game of Thrones has attracted and retained a devoted audience. Now drawing to a dramatic finale in Season 8, this week we take a look back at Season 1 and how by building a powerful series engine the show has kept viewers flocking back to this fantastical world year after year.

ROMA: Turning Your Life Story Into A Screenplay This week, we’re going to be talking about Roma by Alfonso Cuarón. Roma is an extraordinary film that harkens back to a different era of storytelling. It’s shot in black and white, despite having a substantial budget. It’s entirely in Spanish. And, in a way, the whole film is a love poem for Alfonso Cuarón’s real-life nanny from his childhood growing up in the Roma section of México City. The film harkens back to a different kind of filmmaking. An age where storytelling was slower, where the pace was different, where shots were longer without so many quick cuts, and where stories unfolded in a more symbolic kind of way. And that kind of structure is quite appropriate for Roma, because, in a way, it is a nostalgic look back at Alfonso Cuarón’s own life. We’re going to look at Roma to talk about how to write a screenplay from real life. How do you look inside of yourself and find those true stories that matter to you? How do you find the shape you want to put those stories into in order to communicate, not the literal experience, but the emotional experience to an audience?  How do you use your real experiences to open up that little piece of your life in a screenplay? What’s interesting about writing from real life is in many ways these true-life stories are actually the hardest stories to tell. One of the gifts we have as screenwriters is the gift of metaphor. If you're Alfonso Cuarón and you're writing Gravity or Children of Men, you can look at those experiences from your real life through the veil of metaphor. You can convince yourself “Hey, this isn't really me!” By using the technique of metaphor, using a work of fiction in order, to tell the truth, sometimes we allow ourselves to actually see the truth about ourselves and our lives more clearly. And, in doing so, we can also help our audiences see the truth about themselves and their lives more clearly. By abstracting just one degree, or two degrees, or three degrees, or twenty degrees from what actually happened, we allow our subconscious minds to start to give us the clues we haven't yet processed in our conscious minds. We start to actually see the truth of our experiences, in a way that our conscious minds shields us from in our daily life. If you have ever been to therapy, you know what this is like. You come in for your first session, and you think you're in therapy for one reason, and then you start to spend time and you realize you're actually dealing with something completely different. This is exactly what writing a film is like. We start with some story we think we’re telling, or sometimes we think, “Oh, I’ve got a great commercial hook...” But then over the course of a year, or six months, or three months, or however long it takes you to write it, you start to realize, “Oh my God, I’m actually doing something very different. I’m actually telling a story about my mother. I’m actually telling a story about my brother. I’m actually telling a story about this thing that happened to me that I can’t make sense of.” That veil of fiction, the way we convince ourselves we’re using fiction, the way we convince ourselves this character isn't really me, gives us a level of safety within which to play. That way we don’t have to deal with the entirety of our past until we’ve done the work to get ready for it. When you start to tell a true life story like Roma, things start to change. It’s just a fact of life that you are actually the one person you can’t see clearly. This is a physical fact. When you go around in the world, you're looking at other people all the time, but it’s only when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror that you actually see what you look like. In fact, most of us, myself included, have a vision of ourselves that’s from a different era of time. I still think that I’m 33 years old! We actually have a vision of ourselves,

This podcast was taken from our vault.  If you are interested in studying Television Writing with Steve our next class is Feb 3rd-March 3rd; you can sign up here. From GoodFellas to Breaking Bad with Stephen Molton Jake: Today on the podcast, I have a special guest, Steve Molton. Steve is a mentor here at Jacob Krueger Studio, and he’s also just an extraordinarily amazing human being and writer. He’s a Bloomsbury Press Pulitzer Prize Nominee, he’s a former HBO and Showtime executive, he just did a movie with Frank Pugliese, and he’s a general badass. Today we’re going to be talking about not just how cool Steve is, but also about TV Drama. We’re living in a golden age of television, and Steve comes with vast experience. He teaches our TV Writing Class that’s coming up February 3rd,  as well as our ProTrack Mentorship program.   So, Steve, I’d love for you to start by talking a little bit about how is it different today than it was a few years ago. Where are the opportunities now? Steve: That’s a great question. As you know, we’re in yet another golden age. I guess we could probably describe it as a third golden age, because there was the initial one in the ’50s, and then in the ’70s and ’80s, cable transformed everything. And then, there were suddenly a thousand different platforms, and that has given rise to an immense number of shows at any given moment. It has also given rise to web series, to the short form, which we hadn’t seen before. And that opens up a vista for writers, of a kind that no other form of writing does at this point, partly because the appetite is amazingly large for all these companies. Everybody wants to brand themselves, and the most secure way to brand themselves is to create their own series. There has never been more opportunity for original voices as right now. Jake: Yeah, it’s very exciting. Writing feature-length drama is much different than writing television drama. Steve: There’s the rub!  That’s the fascination. And you and I have had experience in both worlds. I always like to position this process as who is the writer in society at this point? And one of the fascinating things, if we go back to our old Greek or Roman heritage, is that we discover pretty quickly this very intimate relationship between the law in a democratic society and the storytellers. And that all began, as you know, you're sitting there smiling because you know all too well, it began with something that the Greek called the Agon. When the Greeks, 2,500 years ago, they were trying to train people in the system of jurisprudence, they’d bring all these people down to Athens once a year, and they’d talk to them about how you serve in a jury, and what the law was, and why this was a cornerstone of the free society, etc. But then, at night, they’d put on tragedies. And what we now know as, sort of, the origin of sitcoms. Strangely enough, we don’t think of sitcoms as being 2,500 years old, but they were!  They are. In the middle of the dramas and tragedies-- there are about 22 of them left to us for us to look at-- but in the middle of each of these dramas there was something called the Agon, which was really like intermission where the people who had come down to learn about their judicial system would debate the kinds of issues that had been raised in the drama itself. And it was out of the Agon that the idea of the protagonist and the antagonist were born. What we often assume is that the protagonist is inherently the good guy. But the reality, all the way back to the Greeks, as it wasn’t really the good person. It was the moral contestant. It was the person who was sort of caught in between. One of the best evocations of that in older literature is Hamlet.  This guy is a moral mess. He’s back and forth between this choice and that choice, and to be or not to be, and yadda yadda. But if you flash forward to somebody like Henry Hill in GoodFellas-- and Henry is a guy I actually encountered in meetings at Showtime,

Beautiful Boy - Where Does Screenplay Structure Come From? This week we’re going to be talking about Beautiful Boy by Luke Davis and Felix van Groeningen. This is a particularly interesting film to discuss in light of our last podcast where we talked about Destroyer and the use of flashbacks in a movie, because Beautiful Boy is also built around flashbacks, but tends to earn those flashbacks in another way. So, we’re going to be looking at Beautiful Boy to talk not just about flashbacks but also about structure, How do you make those structural decisions in your film? Where does screenplay structure actually come from?” If you have seen Beautiful Boy or read reviews of Beautiful Boy, you know that the response has ranged wildly from those who think it is the most beautiful film ever made, to others who feel like it only scratches the surface of the addiction issue, who’ve even compared it to a beautifully produced PSA. Whether you were deeply moved by the film or felt like it only scratched the surface for you, there’s no doubt that the way the structure of Beautiful Boy is constructed grows out of its theme. Beautiful Boy comes at the issue of addiction in a much different way than a movie like Half Nelson or Requiem for A Dream. It is actually adapting two different books one non-fiction memoir written by David Sheff called Beautiful Boy, and one written by his son Nic Sheff entitled Tweak. What the film is basically doing is taking these two non-fiction works and squeezing them together. But it is still primarily looking at the issue of addiction through the eyes of the father played by Steve Carell. And in looking at the father, it basically makes the assumption that we see towards the end of the film when David and his wife Karen find themselves at a 12 Step meeting for parents of addicts, where the sign proclaims, “I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I can’t fix it.” The movie comes at the character of David Sheff from that point of view. This isn't a movie about how the pitfalls of parenting lead to addiction, This isn't a movie about how that empty space in Nic that he describes in the film got created in the first place. This is a movie about a guy who is a good parent, who has a son who is a good kid, who are both fighting the same issue and both failing. Whether you agree with the psychology and the sociology of this premise or not, that’s the thematic place that this piece starts from. We aren't looking at bad fathers and bad sons. We aren't looking at ugly people addicted to ugly things. We’re looking at a loving family torn apart by addiction. This doesn’t prevent the movie from getting deep or complicated in some places. For example there’s a wonderfully complicated scene where David Sheff smokes a joint with his son Nic, not knowing that his son is addicted to a whole array of drugs, thinking that he’s creating a special moment at his son’s request. There’s a very complicated moment when David buys cocaine himself and has a one night cocaine binge--he’s trying to feel what his son is feeling-- or maybe just trying to escape. So, coming at these characters in this way isn't limiting the ability to go deep, but it does cut a lot out. This is true whenever you're using theme. Theme is a way of looking at your screenplays structure and saying, “What am I going to show and what am I going to not show?” “What am I going to dive deep into, and what am I going to skim over? Where am I going to get serious and where am I going to focus my attention?” The truth is in a two hour long movie, you can’t do everything, so you have to choose the things that you want to do. You have to choose where to point your camera and where to point your words so that you know what you're looking at and what you don’t want to look at. Some people are going to love the choices you make:  the people who’re wrestling with the same theme. In this case,

Learn from Destroyer how to use flashbacks in your script. We'll discuss the common pitfalls that can make flashbacks dangerous, and the questions you can ask yourself when using flashbacks to determine if your flashbacks are likely to make the structure of your script stronger, or to get in the way.